Vehicles are used in a variety of settings. For example, aircraft and spacecraft are used in aerospace settings, automobiles, buses, and trains are used in surface settings, and marine vehicles are used on or in marine environments. Health management systems are commonly employed in conjunction with vehicles and similar complex systems for monitoring purposes. Typically, the health management systems may monitor one particular aspect of the vehicle or complex system. The health management systems, however, are beginning to monitor more than one aspect of the vehicle with increasing frequency.
A common problem in the deployment of health management systems is the challenge of providing a function that determines a status of key functions of the vehicle of complex system based on a status of lower level functions, components, or consumables on which a higher level function depends. Commonly, this capability is provided through the evaluation of a complex logic expression, using values for the current status of the lower level functions, components, and/or consumables. The logic expression may be provided by system experts or through analysis of an analytic system model.
Evaluation of the logic expression described above may be sufficient for determining a current status of the function, but it does not provide an ability to predict future availability. Accordingly, a need exists for a mechanism to determine and compute the current and predicted value for the availability of key functions of a vehicle or other complex system, based on the current and predicted availability of its component elements. Furthermore, other desirable features and characteristics of the present invention will become apparent from the subsequent detailed description of the invention and the appended claims, taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings and this background of the invention.